The Forbes Fictional 15

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 12:43 am

apparently, in addition to ranking real billionaires, Forbes creates a yearly list of the 15 wealthiest fictional characters.
Last years list:

Code: Select all

Rank  Name                          Net Worth &#40;$billion&#41;     Age  Residence                     Source
1     Uncle Sam 	                 Infinite                 232  Troy, U.S                     Engraving, Taxes, Oil, Defense
2     Scrooge McDuck 	            29.1                     80   Duckburg, U.S.A.              Mining, Treasure Hunting
3     Richie Rich 	               12.3                     10   Richville, U.S.A.             Inheritance, Conglomerates
4     Gordon Gekko                  8.5                      44   New York, U.S.                Investments
5     Jabba the Hutt                8.4                      603  Tatooine                      Crime, Extortion
6     Ebenezer Scrooge              8.0                      63   London, England               Investments, Banking
7     Bruce Wayne                   7.8                      32   Gotham City, U.S.A.           Inheritance, Defense
8     Thurston Howell III           7.5                      60   Private Island, South Pacific Howell Industries
9     Tony Stark                    6.9                      35   New York, U.S.A.              Inheritance, Defense
10    Adrian "Ozymandias" Veidt     5.4                      47   New York, U.S.A.              Marketing
11    Jed Clampett                  3.6                      51   Beverly Hills, U.S.A          Oil & Gas, Banking
12    Artemis Fowl II               1.6                      15   Dublin, Ireland               Inheritance, Crime
13    C. Montgomery Burns           0.996                    104  Springfield, U.S.A.           Energy
14    Lara Croft                    0.9                      37   Wimbledon, England            Inheritance, Antiquities, Tomb Raiding
15    Mr. Monopoly                  0.8                      71   Atlantic City, U.S.A.         Real Estate

It's bizarre. I guess I understand how the list is created, and it makes sense, but there are some nerds with way too much time on their hands...

shadzar · Post by **shadzar** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 1:05 am

Uncle Sam has no net worth since he can make his own money, so shouldn't be included.

Also Mr Monopoly has vastly increased the amount of his wealth since you don't get $1500 anymore, but 3,000,000 during the game.

I would say those numbers are off and Forbes needs to continue learning to research things for both fiction and non-fiction characters. Also they don't account for inflation for people such as Jed Clampett and others that would have since passed on.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 1:25 am

Scrooge is way off. 29.1 Billion? Where the hell did they get that from? His worth is always given in nonsense numbers, e.g. one multiplujillion, nine obsquatumatillion, six hundred twenty-three dollars and sixty-two cents.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 1:28 am

shadzar wrote:Uncle Sam has no net worth since he can make his own money, so shouldn't be included.

Well, that's actually the specific reason he's estimated to have an infinte net worth, he can print all he wants.
It seems the specific reason they included Uncle Sam was because they needed a new token folk lore character with infinite net worth after dropping Santa. They were bombarded with letters from children saying Santa was real or something... Otherwise they have a rule against Folk Lore or Mythological characters, no I don't know why they seem to decide to have a single folk loric character.

Also Mr Monopoly has vastly increased the amount of his wealth since you don't get $1500 anymore, but 3,000,000 during the game.

The last time I played Monopoly it was an incredibly old version, so I don't know what the current rules are. To quote Forbes on his inclusion:

Forbes wrote:Atlantic City real estate speculator also known as Rich Uncle Pennybags lost everything in 2007 subprime crash; did not pass go; was sent directly to jail. Then in a stunning display of Chance, Monopoly's Christmas fund matured, he got out of jail for free and advanced to the nearest railroad. Assisted by a generous dollop of federal bailout funds from the Community Chest, Monopoly began snapping up distressed properties; now owns luxury houses, hotels on Park Place, Pennsylvania Ave. Rumored to control all of Atlantic City's railroads.

I would say those numbers are off and Forbes needs to continue learning to research things for both fiction and non-fiction characters. Also they don't account for inflation for people such as Jed Clampett and others that would have since passed on.

well hell, Clampett lost 8 billion dollars of net worth between 07 and 08, while Ebenezer Scrooge seemed to gain a like amount out of nowhere in 08, so by my rationalizing, Clampett owed Scrooge 8 billion.

hm. it seems the Wikipedia list (which is what I CP'ed) is off. Wayne and Stark are flipped, and Wayne's wealth is wrong...

the Forbes list:
1. Uncle Sam
2. Scrooge McDuck
3. Richie Rich
4. Gordon Gekko
5. Jabba The Hutt
6. Ebeneezer Scrooge
7. Tony Stark
8. Thurston Howell III
9. Bruce Wayne
10. Adrian Veidt
11. Jed Clampett
12. Artemis Fowl II
13. C. Montgomery Burns
14. Lara Croft
15. Mr. Monopoly

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 1:29 am

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Scrooge is way off. 29.1 Billion? Where the hell did they get that from? His worth is always given in nonsense numbers, e.g. one multiplujillion, nine obsquatumatillion, six hundred twenty-three dollars and sixty-two cents.

They apparently actually analyzed his material assets and compared them to real world values.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 1:31 am

PA wrote: Well, that's actually the specific reason he's estimated to have an infinte net worth, he can print all he wants.

I don't want to get tangled up in this debate, all I can say is that I am appalled that a magazine like Fricking Forbes would say that you can increase your net worth by printing more money.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 1:34 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
PA wrote: Well, that's actually the specific reason he's estimated to have an infinte net worth, he can print all he wants.
I don't want to get tangled up in this debate, all I can say is that I am appalled that a magazine like Fricking Forbes would say that you can increase your net worth by printing more money.

Yeah, I know. For that matter, fucking Dr. Manhatten should be on the list, not only can he create his own money out of thin air, he could create, say, steel out of thin air and then sell it.

shadzar · Post by **shadzar** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 1:36 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
PA wrote: Well, that's actually the specific reason he's estimated to have an infinte net worth, he can print all he wants.
I don't want to get tangled up in this debate, all I can say is that I am appalled that a magazine like Fricking Forbes would say that you can increase your net worth by printing more money.

Why? It is exactly what America has been doing since it got off the gold standard, and a main reason for the decline in the worldwide value of the US Dollar.

Monopoly has more than one game now, so you have to consider ALL of the games, the credit card version that doesn't use the paper money, Monopoly City ( http://www.monopolycitystreets.com ), and a plethora of other Monopoly games, even including the McDonald's Monopoly.

So Rich Uncle Pennybags probably has more money now than GoldmanSacks.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 1:38 am

hell, for that matter, you could conceivably assume that all the money of sales of the monopoly game go to Mr. Monopoly within that universe and just assume his worth on that basis.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 1:46 am

shadzar wrote:Why? It is exactly what America has been doing since it got off the gold standard, and a main reason for the decline in the worldwide value of the US Dollar.

And I'm sure the epiphany why printing out zillions of dollars won't increase your net worth by all that much will hint you soon.

Hint: if I am a Zimbabwean dictator and I tie my currency to the Euro and then print out forty trillion dollars, does my net worth go up? Or would the rest of the people in the world declare that my money is bullshit and then my net worth is suddenly tied to assets like mines and buildings and shit?

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 3:02 am

Prak_Anima wrote:They apparently actually analyzed his material assets and compared them to real world values.

That's such bullshit. How do you analyze the value of 'three cubic acres of money'? Those 'cubic acres' (not a real unit of measure) aren't uniform, either; the bottom four feet are known to be star sapphires. Quite apart from the contents of the money bin (which is not his only one), he has poorly-defined 'holdings' around the world, of which there is no consistent depiction.

But the 'one multiplujillion, etc.' number is what he actually gets when he audits his total net worth in a story where that's a plot point. In other stories one gets similarly ridiculous numbers; and while I don't know how much a fantasticatillion is, I know that it's more than a quadrillion, because there's no room below that in the terminology.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 3:28 am

fantasticatillion

Greatest made-up number ever.

But if we're talking plot points - there are also those other ones where Unca Scrooge is down to only his number one dime.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 3:55 am

Josh_Kablack wrote:Greatest made-up number ever.

But if we're talking plot points - there are also those other ones where Unca Scrooge is down to only his number one dime.

Not familiar with those plots myself, but even so, he has it all back by the end of the story, right?

I mean, frequently he loses the contents of his Duckburg money bin (only to get it back by story's end), but that's just the money he made by his own efforts, and it has sentimental value - without it, Scrooge feels poor, just like he does without old number one. But it's not even the majority of the value of his total holdings.

There is, to my knowledge, only one time that Scrooge's wealth is ever in-universe described using actual numbers. When some magical nonsense sabotages his wealth, he starts losing a billion dollars a minute - and claims that this will leave him broke in 600 years. So that's roughly 316,576,000 billion dollars in 1950 money, or roughly 8.85 times that amount in today's money.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 5:08 am

shadzar wrote: I don't run this worthless fucking country, so nothing will HIT (not hint) me at any point in time. Tell the retards like Obama to stop letting banks print their own money, and give it to themselves under the pretense of a bailout.

[/derail]

Okay, but that still doesn't change the fact that you can't appreciably increase your net worth by printing more money.

shadzar · Post by **shadzar** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 5:13 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
shadzar wrote: I don't run this worthless fucking country, so nothing will HIT (not hint) me at any point in time. Tell the retards like Obama to stop letting banks print their own money, and give it to themselves under the pretense of a bailout.

[/derail]

Okay, but that still doesn't change the fact that you can't appreciably increase your net worth by printing more money.

I made that point in the second or third post in this thread, where I said Uncle Sam shouldn't be included. I was just explaining away your surprise based on actual events, and why Forbes felt it was applicable to include Uncle Sam. Sadly it is the way America works, right or wrong.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 5:24 am

so those are the only two that raise eyebrows? Uncles Sam and Scrooge?

What about Jabba the Hutt? Conceivably one might be able to calculate the investments and holdings of a fantastically wealthy duck or avatar of America...

But an alien criminal? How, precisely, does one calculate the net worth of an entity who doesn't even exist in a universe that has an America, let alone anything specifically defined as a real world asset, other than body guards, mercenaries, assassins and slaves. Do these things have a real world value?

shadzar · Post by **shadzar** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 5:57 am

Jabba can be explained due to his land holdings. Jabba's Palace has X square feet in a region of a desert environment. So by extrapolating the value per square foot of his home(s) and business locations, you can get a value of wealth or at LEAST that. Add in his henchmen pay, then you can figure he has either income to support this spending, or liquid assets in order to pay just laying around in the form of Republic Credits, or whatever.

I don't dispute Scrooge having wealth, just maybe what it is at. The problem is Uncle Sam in the way it is calculated, and then you have to consider that "he" represents a non-fictional entity, which is every citizen and accounts receivable/payable held by the real world USA. Which technically puts Uncle Sam in the hole by a few trillion dollars currently. Which makes him owe more money than Whimpy.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 6:05 am

yeah, the inclusion of Uncle Sam is obvious dick sucking/waving. And they likely felt they had created a tradition of "One folk loric character with infinite wealth" since Santa's been on since I don't fucking know when and they had to nix that.

Obviously they can't say "Lucifer's net worth is Infinite! He tops the Fictional 15!" because people would shit their pants, despite it being accurate (how else does he buy all those souls? at least...)

Actually, I'm still kinda incredulous that they're including criminals, and especially criminals that used crime to gain money. I'd think that on the list of real people they aren't including criminals... but I don't know.

Though it brings up other characters that should be on there... Kingpin, for one... maybe the Penguin. or Joker. fuck, where the hell does the Joker get all his toys and still have money to give Harley to go shopping?

Count Arioch the 28th · Thu Oct 29, 2009 6:26 am

shadzar wrote:
Lago PARANOIA wrote:
shadzar wrote: I don't run this worthless fucking country, so nothing will HIT (not hint) me at any point in time. Tell the retards like Obama to stop letting banks print their own money, and give it to themselves under the pretense of a bailout.

[/derail]

Okay, but that still doesn't change the fact that you can't appreciably increase your net worth by printing more money.
I made that point in the second or third post in this thread, where I said Uncle Sam shouldn't be included. I was just explaining away your surprise based on actual events, and why Forbes felt it was applicable to include Uncle Sam. Sadly it is the way America works, right or wrong.

Inflation is good in small enough amounts. Especially if you have large amounts of debt.

Getting off the gold standard is a good move. If you base your monetary system on a substance that's both finite and extremely useful for a lot of different vital processes, you have runaway deflation. That is extremely bad. The only people that advocate the Gold Standard really should be institutionalized for being profoundly mentally handicapped.

Jacob_Orlove · Post by **Jacob_Orlove** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 6:31 am

Is Jabba seriously the wealthiest character in Star Wars ? I guess it's possible, but that's a poor universe if so.

This whole list should be full of far-future SF characters, incidentally. Leto Atreides II, for example.

shadzar · Post by **shadzar** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 6:33 am

Jacob_Orlove wrote:Is Jabba seriously the wealthiest character in Star Wars ? I guess it's possible, but that's a poor universe if so.

This whole list should be full of far-future SF characters, incidentally. Leto Atreides II, for example.

WEll if Uncle Sam that represents a real world nation is included, the The Republic, should far outshine even him, and Jabba. Which would mean Emperor Palpatine should be on the list as controlling party...literally.

Good point.

ubernoob · Post by **ubernoob** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 7:21 am

Shadzar, didn't anyone ever tell you that pointing out someone's obvious typing error tells them that you aren't competent enough to address their point?

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 8:18 am

I rather think it would be obvious to anyone who is not you that you've screwed up the words which are coming out of your keyboard.

Blind or not, they're reading those words somehow. And they don't get a special editor that tells them what you were thinking...

-Crissa

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 12:53 pm

Prak, seriously, I hate Count a lot, but stop being a vagina, Tardzar seriously has contributed exactly dick all to the board anywhere, and has spent this thread praising the gold standard and claiming that printing money adds to net wealth.

Any even remotely sane person knows the gold standard is bullshit crap, and fiat money actually works much better. The fact that he thinks this incredibly retarded thing because he is a failure at life, who ignores things like basic level education in history/economics/politics, is precisely the fucking point.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 1:19 pm

Uncle Sam isn’t fictional. (Samuel Wilson) His source of revenue was in meat packing for the Federal Government. He was prosperous, but I would not put him on a Forbes list.